You’ve almost gotta feel bad for the tech companies who have to announce quarterly financial results in the wake of Apple’s gangbuster $46.33 billion fiscal first quarter. Case in point: Nokia, the onetime giant of the cell phone business, whose fortunes have gone the other way in the last quarter, with a $1.3 billion loss. Hang in there, Nokia… it’s almost Friday, and the weekend is sure to be kinder on you than the last three months. Meanwhile, let’s have a peek at what else is making news on this Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Michael Orton is a fine-art and landscape photographer. He is also the creator of the “Orton Effect”. This finish is based around a process whereby a copy of an image is blurred and then combined with the original to produce a soft, dreamlike effect. It’s well-suited to portraits, but can be used to enhance many other subjects for which you want an ethereal, romanticized look.

When you cut a clip and insert another in iMovie, its audio is cut at the same time. But if you watch any movie, you’ll notice that this isn’t what usually happens: a scene between two people takes place, the action cuts between a shot of one to another before the first person has finished speaking, yet you can still hear them.

My wife and I have a huge iPhoto library on an external hard drive connected to our iMac. We are going on vacation for a week and I was wondering if we can take the hard drive with us, open the iPhoto library on my MacBook Pro and edit, tag, and organize the photos and have the changes stick once we bring the drive back home.

They say good fences make good neighbors, and what goes for backyards may be even truer online. For most of us, using a Mac means that we don’t have to worry about intrusive computer viruses. But the internet is a big place, full of all sorts of evils looking for vulnerable computers, and a firewall can help keep your Mac secure. Here’s the lowdown on what a firewall is, how it works, and how to set up the one that’s already on your computer (trust us, it’s way easier than you think). We’ve also looked at some third-party firewall applications that offer features, flexibility, and protection that OS X alone can’t match. With the right software in place, you’ll be browsing, sharing, and surfing more safely in no time.

The windows that pop up when you choose to open or save something on your Mac are perfectly good at what they do. But you can improve them a lot by installing and setting up Default Folder X. This is a little add-on app that costs $34.95, but you can try it for free for 30 days to see if you like it. It does a number of things and we’re going to show you its key features and how to make the most of them.

Look at any movie or television show, from any period, and you’ll see that the editing never stays on the same shot for too long. In fact, you may feel that some do overstay their welcome and you get impatient for the camera to move on to something else. Changing shots doesn’t mean changing scenes: when done right, cutting to different angles keeps the story interesting and the pace flowing. It also makes it easier to use a better take, or to cut to the scenery that is being described in the current shot, while still hearing the narrator talk about the location.

We’re all familiar with the expression “what goes up, must come down” -- but apparently that means nothing to the folks at Apple Inc., who continue to soar ever-higher with their quarterly financial results. Tuesday was no exception, with first quarter revenue of $46.33 billion and net profit of $13.06 billion. Is there any end in sight for this runaway money-making freight train?